


Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall

by Emmyjean



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angels of Death, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Childhood Trauma, Dark-ish, Eventual Smut, F/M, God(dess) of Death, Grim Reaper - Freeform, Hades and Persephone Vibes, I tagged graphic depictions of violence but they're not TOO bad, Like within the first chapter, Lucifer's Fall, Mr. Death, Mutual Pining, Near Death Experiences, Possessive Behavior, Rey starts young but grows up quickly, Shades of Meet Joe Black, Slow-ish burn, Sort of a blend of several mythologies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 08:35:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15991577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmyjean/pseuds/Emmyjean
Summary: In the morning, she'll remember her many brushes with death and the ghostly contact that had preceded her rescue from each of them. Perhaps he really had come to her - this spirit, or guardian angel, or whatever he is. Perhaps he’s been with her all along.The next time he visits her dreams, she asks for a name.He doesn’t answer.





	Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I have other fics I should be focusing on but I sat down to write and this sort of just came out. I don't expect this to be a long one. I've got it set at four chapters for now. Hope it's decent!
> 
> This chapter is short-ish, sort of just a prologue. I imagine they'll be longer from here on out.

The first time he comes to her, she’s eight years old. 

It’s winter in London. Not freezing, but the chill in the air combined with the fact that Rey hasn’t been able to scavenge up anything to eat and is currently starving is more than her little body can bear. Huddled next to a dumpster, skinny arms wrapped around her legs and thin clothes covered in filth, she has long stopped shivering and is quietly drifting into unconsciousness.

It’s nothing more than a brush against her consciousness - like a moth’s wings against a window pane - but it’s enough to make her raise her head and open her eyes to scan the dim alley.

“Who’s there?” she calls weakly.

Miraculously, someone calls back. A woman.

“Hello?”

Rey rests her temple on her knees again, too exhausted to muster much enthusiasm for the voice, and murmurs, “Yes.”

A moment later, an older woman in a tweed coat appears before her, dragging her shopping trolley behind her. When she spots Rey, her expression goes from pinched with concentration to slack with horror in a blink.

“Oh, dear,” she gasps, bending at the waist and extending one gloved hand to rest the backs of her knuckles against Rey’s cold cheek, “What in heaven’s name are you doing out here?”

Rey only manages a shrug, and the woman looks left and right as she ponders what she’s going to do. After a moment, she straightens, grasping Rey’s elbow firmly and pulling her up.

“Right, well we can’t leave you out here like this, can we? You’re chilled to the bone. Come on, let’s get you round the corner for some hot soup.”

“Don’t need charity,” Rey mumbles, although the tears that fill her eyes at the mention of a hot meal sort of negate the statement. The woman looks at her with a raised brow, as though she’s thinking this very thing, and wraps a hand around Rey’s shoulder.

“None of that, now. Let’s go.”

Rey drops the pretense of strength, telling herself it’s ok to be needy just this once. The woman takes her into the pub around the corner, buys her some potato soup and a cup of tea, and promptly leaves her in the custody of the police as soon as they show up to take Rey away.

Back to the orphanage she goes - but at least she’s alive, and not dead in an alleyway.

 

~~

 

The second time, she’s thirteen.

She’s lying in her cot, bruised and bloodied, knowing she’s going to catch hell for not going downstairs at the dinner bell but unable to bring herself to care. In her hand she clutches the remnants of what had been a doll -  _ her  _ doll, the one she’d made when she was eight. It hadn’t been much to look at, just a poorly-sewn rag doll - but it had meant the world to Rey.

She’d fashioned it a tweed coat out of a scrap of burlap she’d found one day. It had been a source of comfort for Rey for years, and now it’s in tatters.

She knew on some level that she was too old to put so much emotional importance on something as silly as a doll, but it wasn’t as though she’d had anything to take its place, so it didn't matter too much.

Until today. 

The other girls didn’t like Rey. They thought she was strange because she was always interested in the wrong things. She didn’t want to read fashion magazines or talk about boys. She wanted to tinker with the ancient computer they had and build models.

Today, they’d decided for her - it was time to give up dolls. Feigning concern for her maturity level, they tried to take it from her, and Rey had flown into a rage. Rey was scrappy, strong - but three against one weren’t very good odds, and in the end both she and her beloved doll had been left torn up on the dormitory floor.

She doesn’t know how long she’d been lying there, surrounded by bits of stuffing and torn fabric, but she’d simply gathered what she could of what was left of her doll and stumbled to her cot. She almost fell, once, and her words were coming out jumbled as she tried to tell her doll she was sorry.

Rey knows they’ll blame her for the incident. Again, three against one - and she knows the staff don’t care much about getting to the bottom of these scraps. They’re content if someone is punished as an example, and that’s all.

Her tears and the blood from her split lip wet her pillow as she burrows in, trying to cling to the quiet in what she knows is the calm before the storm. She finds it hard to reconcile the emotions swirling through her - the conflicting wish that everyone would just leave her alone, and the aching emptiness that makes her wish with all her heart that she didn’t  _ have  _ to be alone anymore.

She supposes there are lots of different ways to feel alone.

Her head pounds and she feels like her skull is going to split open. A wave of nausea abruptly overtakes her, sending her heaving over the edge of her bed and spilling bile from her empty stomach onto the floor. Dizzy, she pulls herself back and drops her head on the pillow.

Tired. She’s so tired. Sleep is a siren’s call.

Just for a minute, she thinks as her eyes fall shut - she’ll be woken up soon enough when they come for her. In the meantime, she’ll just sleep. When she wakes up, the headache will be gone.

Then, she feels it - the whisper against her awareness. She remembers it, from the time before - in the alley, just before the woman in tweed found her.

She jolts, and the movement sends another stabbing pain straight through her temple. She retches again, bringing up nothing because there’s nothing to bring up, then can’t help letting out a pathetic little wail as she falls back onto her pillow.

A figure fills the doorway, tall and willowy, drawn from where she’d been walking briskly down the corridor by the sound of Rey’s cry. Rey doesn’t recognize her.

“What happened to you?” the woman exclaims sharply, striding into the room and leaning over Rey’s bed.

The tone is brisk, efficient - and those are adjectives that usually translate for Rey into ‘accusatory’, so she tries to defend herself. Her speech is still funny, all slurred together like she has something sticky in her mouth, and she has trouble remembering the words she wants to use. The woman reaches into her pocket for what turns out to be a small torch. She shines it in Rey’s eyes, one after the other, and then sighs.

“I think you’re concussed. You need to get to a hospital,” the woman murmurs, more to herself than to Rey.

Twenty-four hours later, Rey is lying between crisp, white sheets in a hospital bed. Even though the bed is the most comfortable one she’s ever been in, she finds herself weeping again because when she woke up - apparently, she’d lost consciousness at some point - she found that the scraps of her doll had been left behind.

Of course they wouldn’t think to take them with, she chided herself miserably. They looked like trash.

Trash gets thrown away. Left behind.

_ Time to grow up, _ she thinks to herself.

The doctor comes in after a couple of hours and explains that her concussion had been the result of a blow to the head. He asks who hit her, and she doesn’t tell him. The last thing she needs is more trouble, and anyway, pointing fingers at people won’t undo her concussion.

And it won’t mend her doll.

In the end, she doesn’t go back to that orphanage. It turns out that the woman who found her was some higher-up who’d been doing an unannounced inspection of the facility. She’d been doing a once-over of the dormitory while the residents were at dinner, so it had been a fluke that anybody had been there to find Rey at all.

They said that if Rey had gone to sleep and hadn’t been tended to until after everyone got back, the brain swelling may have killed her.

As she’s introduced to her new foster father, Unkar Plutt, she wonders what kind of guardian he’ll be. Anything is better than the orphanage, she supposes.

As she steps into his small row house, she wonders idly if she’ll ever see Ms. Holdo again - the woman who found her in that dormitory. She’d like to thank her, one day.

It was a good thing she woke up when she had, too, or Ms. Holdo would have walked right past her dorm without ever thinking to look in.

_ There must be someone watching over me, _ she thinks fancifully to herself.

She wonders if it’s her parents, and then wonders if that would be good or bad. If it is, then it means they really do love her - but it also means they really are dead.

She decides not to think about it anymore.

  
  


~~

  
  


She’s seventeen when it happens again.

Unkar Plutt had turned out to be a mixed bag. He never beats her or otherwise abuses her, but he also doesn’t give a shit about her. He is there for the paycheck, and he makes sure Rey knows it. 

She honestly doesn’t mind. No, he doesn’t cook her meals like he’s supposed to, or send her to school - he’d told the government that he’s ‘homeschooling’ her, and that basically consisted of him getting her a library card - but he does make sure there’s always food in the cupboards and he doesn’t hinder her from doing whatever she needs to do to take care of herself.

Rey enjoys her newfound freedom. She knows she should be going to school, but instead she does odd jobs for pocket money and goes to the library to read. She loves reading, and she figures she’s basically doing what every other kid her age is doing in school anyway. She always passes her exams, so she figures it’s fine.

She’s walking across a road, her nose in a biography, when she hears the blaring of a horn. Her head snaps up just in time to see the bonnet of a lorry about a half-meter from her face - and then she’s shoved forward so hard she flies into the air before crashing onto the pavement on the other side, her book and the apple she’d been munching flying out of her grasp.

Wincing, she twists around amidst the sound of tires screeching and voices yelling in concern to catch a glimpse of her savior. She sees - something. Nothing she can identify, and she thinks briefly that she may have just imagined it - the shadow that flickers out as she squints through the windows of the lorry that had nearly hit her, just before her vision is obscured by the crowd gathering around her.

It’s only after she’s assured everyone that’s she’s not hurt and apologized profusely to the shaken lorry driver that she feels it. 

She’s retrieving her book from where it lies on the ground, having thankfully missed landing in a large puddle, when the ghostly presence brushes her consciousness again. This time, it’s accompanied by a physical sensation that almost feels like - fingertips flitting over her face.

She starts and spins around, finding nothing around her but dead leaves dancing across the pavement, carried by the gentle afternoon breeze.

 

~~

 

That night, she dreams of a dark figure. She can’t see him, but his deep voice tells her he’s a man.

Something else, though - an awareness she can’t quite quantify - tells her that he’s the furthest thing from it.

“Who are you?” her dream-self murmurs. She feels the ripple of surprise in the air around her as tangibly as if she’d felt it herself.

“You can see me?”

“No,” she says, swallowing, “Not really. I just know you’re there. What are you?”

He’s silent for a moment, then he asks, “What do you think I am?”

“A dream,” she replies, confused at the question.

“A dream can be whatever you want it to be. So, what am I?”

She feels herself slipping back into obliviousness again, the next sleep cycle, and replies nonsensically, “You’re here.”

He says nothing, and she thinks she can feel it again - the faintest suggestion of a caress both physical and mental as she slips away.

In the morning, she’ll remember the dream and the caress. She’ll remember her many brushes with death and the ghostly contact that had preceded her rescue from each of them, and she’ll think to herself with a shudder that perhaps the presence that had visited her dream actually  _ is  _ real.

Perhaps he really  _ had  _ come to her - this spirit, or guardian angel, or whatever he is.

Perhaps he’s been with her all along.

She doesn’t know if the thought is comforting or foreboding.

 

~~

 

The next time he visits her dreams a few days later, she asks for a name.

He doesn’t answer. 

The silence that surrounds them in the little purgatory between sleep and wakefulness is deafening, devoid even of the sounds of their breathing. She wonders if he  _ does  _ breathe. It’s eerie.

Unnatural.

She wakes suddenly and realizes she’s fallen asleep on the night bus. Pulling herself up to glance out the window and figure out where the hell she is, she muses that maybe she’ll just name him herself. Giving him - it, or whatever - a name would make all this strangeness less unsettling, somehow.

The bus stops on Whitehall near the Embankment, and Rey can hear Big Ben tolling in the distance.

_ Ben _ , she thinks. That sounds normal.

That’ll do for now.

When she gets back to Plutt’s - a place she still hasn’t ever referred to as ‘home’, even in her own head - undresses and crawls into bed, she realizes the hair on the back of her neck is still standing on end. She lies down, staring at the rectangle of yellow light cast on the ceiling by the street lamps outside the window and shivering.

She hopes he won’t come to her again tonight.

She wonders if she’s going insane.

She decides that she can’t stay awake all night, and wonders if maybe the presence is coming to her because it’s lonely. Just like her.

It’s better to assume, if it really does exist - if she’s  _ not  _ simply going mad - that it’s benevolent, instead of evil. She has to frame it like that for herself if she’s ever going to sleep again.

She turns onto her side and closes her eyes, whispering into the darkness.

“Goodnight, Ben.”

 

~~

 

He doesn’t come to her that night. Or the next.

She doesn’t sense him again, either in dreams or wakefulness, for nearly five years.

She talks to him sometimes, idly, as time goes by - he turns into a sort of imaginary friend for her. He never answers, and as the years pass, she begins to accept that he was a kind of psychological projection that manifested in her dreams to help her deal with trauma. She supposes there aren’t many experiences more traumatic than having a brush with death, so it makes sense.

She almost forgets about him - or at least she forgets about how real he’d seemed.

Until the day of her twenty-second birthday, when she’s attacked by a man with a knife as she walks home from a pub where she’d been celebrating with work friends.

It happens before her brain has even processed the fact that she’s in danger. One second, her attacker is grabbing her, his blade at her windpipe - and then his eyes widen as two gloved hands grasp his head and give it a violent twist, the fatal snap of his neck earsplitting in the damp emptiness of the deserted park, the rain beating down on his body as it falls to the grass with a heavy thud.

Rey stares, her face twisted in horror as she scrambles to her feet, shoes slipping on the muddy ground. She backs up a few steps before raising her gaze to her hulking savior. A massive beast of a man stands in the shadows before her, clad in a tattered black coat, his fists clenched and his face obscured by his hood.

She wonders frantically if she would have been better off with the first bloke as she reaches in her pocket for her mace, cursing herself for being so tipsy that she hadn’t thought to grab it in the first place.

He takes two menacing steps forward before stopping abruptly at the sight of the mace, the rain pouring down now. 

“You’re afraid of me,” he says, more an observation than a question, “Why? I saved you.”

“You  _ killed  _ a man!” she spits back, jerking her chin at the dead mugger on the ground, “You didn’t have to do that! It was senseless!”

“It’s what I do,” he replies, a tinge of dry, bitter humor coloring his voice, “And it’s almost  _ always  _ senseless.”

Cold dread envelops her even as she grits her teeth, preparing to run for her life as she snarls, “You’re a  _ monster.” _

“Is that what you’re calling me these days?” he asks mildly, tilting his head as he regards her, “As I recall, you used to call me ‘Ben’.”

It’s the last thing she hears before she loses consciousness.

When she wakes back up, he’s gone. Vanished, as if he was merely a hallucination.

Or a nightmare. 

That’s when she knows. She  _ knows  _ \- and her world tilts on its axis.

He  _ is  _ real.

And he is most definitely not an angel.

**Author's Note:**

> I know the Death/Hades and Persephone thing has been done a billion times (and much better than I could ever do it), but I still had to give it a shot because I love it so much. Thanks for reading!


End file.
